


Tidal Breath

by ndnickerson



Series: Tallest Tower [2]
Category: Nancy Drew - Keene
Genre: Angst, Drama, Gen, Self-Harm, Suicidal Thoughts
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2009-12-29
Updated: 2009-12-29
Packaged: 2017-10-05 11:30:31
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,868
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/41293
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ndnickerson/pseuds/ndnickerson
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Carson decides to bring his daughter home.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Tidal Breath

She wakes every morning thinking his name.

The weight of it is enough to kill her. She can feel it every time she breathes in, every time she closes her eyes, while she's in the shower, while she buries her head in the pillow and waits for sleep, for dreams of him, to claim her. She doesn't see his face but his name, the single syllable, is on her every exhalation, every beat of her heart.

The first time she tried to make it stop, she was standing in the cramped loud kitchen in the back of a chain restaurant, where they didn't care what name she gave or what she'd done as long as she could do her job, her hair netted and her eyes dull, and one of the waitresses had come up behind her and lifted her arm out of the pink water, and her skin was puckered-wet and angry, and she didn't release the jagged square of broken glass in her right fist even as she slumped on weak legs to her weaker knees, even as the sirens blared in the distance.

And there was no voice in her head strong enough to drown it out, there was nothing, she was just hollowed-out and blistered dark inside.

It looked enough like an accident that the emergency room nurse let her go with a stitched and bandaged arm, and a stiff admonition to be more careful. The next night she was gone.

\--

The slowest, most painful, worst death in the world, Carson knows, is supposed to be a bullet to the stomach. He thinks about it while he's lying over the cheap motel-room bedspread with his shoes still on and his arms folded behind his head, watching a dust-streaked cowboy slowly poke through the remains of a ghost town on the television. 

He knows of slower deaths, and he has seen men and women die while he tried to defend them against life sentences, he has seen men and women die drowned in grief and guilt over the broken body of a dead child. For a quarter of a century, for half his life, he's been strong enough to walk through it.

He has been walking through the remains of his daughter's life for three weeks and found nothing but ashes.

He keeps a list of the places she called from, and he packed a suitcase for each of the people he might need to be. His best suit, if she is in a police station and needs him to bail her out; an old faded sweater and jeans for ducking into the dark bars she's visited. He can feel her nowhere.

His last picture of her, the one he keeps in his pocket to show around, was taken for her engagement announcement, for the Morning Record, for the family newsletter, for the photo album. He keeps it folded in half, and during those times he can bring himself to glance at the other figure in the photo, the smiling face of the man his daughter was supposed to marry, he finds himself wishing that, even after everything, that they had never met, that his little Nancy had stayed with her microscopes and fingerprinting kits and lockpicks, instead of meeting the one man who had made her see past it all. And it would be no betrayal; she would have never known, and now her heart would be unbroken, she would be smiling at the breakfast table and complimenting his French toast instead of in the middle of nowhere, hiding from him.

He is the only one looking for her and he knows that. He shielded her from the investigation into Lila's death, and no jury would convict her for what he knows she did. Bess and George, Hannah, Ned's parents, are all worried, all want her to be safe, but the lengths to which Nancy has gone to hide herself are extraordinary. He has someone at the office, just in case she calls, but it has been three weeks since the last one. He has called in a thousand favors, called everyone she's ever worked with, every case, every police detective and ally she's ever made. Every night Hannah pours through the meticulous files Nancy kept and calls him with a new list of leads, but here, in this dilapidated hotel on the outskirts of a dying town, Nancy's trail has gone cold, what little of it he ever found.

He jumps and his heart quickens when his cell phone sounds from the bedside table, and even as he answers it he has to remind himself that hoping will only make the disappointment all the more bitter.

"Found her yet?"

"No," Carson replies, closing his eyes and pinching the bridge of his nose, hearing the younger man sigh in disappointment on the other end of the faintly staticky line. Nancy's relationship with Frank was always complicated, but Carson knows he would retask NSA satellites, would personally torture each and every person Nancy has helped put away, if it would help find her.

"Anything I can do?"

"You'll be the first person I call if there is," he says, finishing their script they have recited once a week every week since she has been gone. On the television the wagons are circling. There should be standoffs, there should be endgames and puzzles and clues he can figure out; he dreams of ledges, of her red-gold hair whipped by the wind as she screams her grief and pain to him, and then he pulls her back with a hug and a promise, so the credits can roll, so the torture can end.

Those are only his dreams. In his nightmares he finds her in the back of a burned out shell of a house, on a thin dirty mattress, her eyes glassed and blank, gone past oblivion, past his reach.

When Carson hangs up the phone he knows what he'll have to do, but like every night for the past three weeks he reaches instead for the bottle, to make sure there will be no nightmares, and especially no dreams.

\--

She does not think of how things will be when this fragile shell of a life ends, because there will be no end. When she walks through the local Wal-Mart, picking out cheap cotton shirts and hardly bruised apples, when she thinks of her reinvention as a secretary in the main office at a mobile home lot, there is no joy in it and she no longer sees herself, and it's a relief. She avoids looking in the mirror, and she doesn't recognize herself there anymore. The cheap dye turned her hair a muddy and unremarkable shade of brown, and she gave her last remaining lip gloss to a pale quiet girl in the next cot at the last women's shelter, whose right eye was bruised black, whose mother jerked at the slightest noise.

In line for the cashier Nancy is behind two girls of about her own age, their cart filled with matte silver boxes, and they duck, whisper, giggle, and Nancy thinks sadly of Bess and George and the last time she could take a breath without feeling like she was coming apart, when she sees the bored cashier scan the first silver box, the plain tulle veil.

And after that her limbs feel like solid lead, and she forces herself to put everything on the damp sticky conveyer belt, and instead of mumbling her usual greeting, the girl with the bangs in her eyes in her blue smock tilts her head and says abruptly, "Are you all right?"

Nancy doesn't bother wiping her wet face. "Yeah," she says, flatly. "I'm alive."

On the bus she lets herself think it, the plastic bags slipping and unsteady on her lap as they round corners, back to another room, back to the remains of this false life.

_I wish I wasn't._

\--

The last of the scotch makes a small pale suggestion of a wave at the bottom of the glass, and he can't think why he left it. Maybe it's like a tidal breath, the axe behind the glass, to take in case of emergency, to take when he wakes sweating and gasping in the night with the blankets twisted around his legs. At the liquor store he was ignored by the cashiers, a pair of weatherbeaten men with large biceps whose eyes casually traced the paths of the giggling girls, girls who look like Nancy only in the suggestion of their cheekbones and the quick flutterings of their fingers. They look bright, soft, they laugh, and of the few things he knows of Nancy now, he knows that she does not.

In the parking lot with the brown paper bag in his hands Carson thinks of finding an ouija board, and he smiles without humor, because Catherine would have appreciated that.

On the wall in this latest motel room he has a map, and pins in every state she's visited. There's a pin in every state, red pins for good leads. He knows to ignore those now. He knows he can ignore everything, as he puts the bottle down on the dresser, still wrapped in its brown paper bag.

Grief changes people. Grief changed him, subtly, over nights, through memories, and he knows that he was someone different before his wife's death, even if every fingerprint and lifeline and freckle is the same. The Nancy he knew is gone and the person she was becoming, in that stark deathbed at the hospital, at his graveside, that is the person she is now.

Carson has been okay for twelve years. He's pushed his memories of her and their life and how happy he was with her, how happy, how he will never be again, he's pushed those back, until they have begun to crumble in the dark, until only the essence remains. The walls have taken years to build and they hide things he never wants to see again. There are sirens there, songs that will make him want to drown, to expel that last tidal breath and let go.

He counts the pins and folds the map. He takes the phone off the hook and turns his mobile off. He lets that last suggestion of a sip of scotch touch his tongue, and unwraps the new bottle, leaves it sealed on the table beside him.

He draws the blinds and closes his eyes and lets it take him, because Nancy might be on the other side.

\--

It's fall in Texas and she's wearing long sleeves because she doesn't want to answer the questions that would come otherwise.

She is in a garden, a vast garden that stretches to the horizon, and it is the closest she has felt to peace in a while. She is alone. Being around people doesn't ever seem to work out. She's forgotten what normal feels like and has little interest in pretending anymore.

In River Heights she had to pretend that she wasn't the space of a single thought away from falling over the edge. Here they only care if it means she isn't doing her job, and she only has to see other people when she punches in and out, when she goes to the grocery store, when she buys gasoline. On the weekends she fills the car and takes a five-gallon red plastic container with her, and thinks of driving until she is the only living thing as far as she can see, and then ending it. She just hasn't found the nerve yet, but she can feel it, that an end will be coming soon. There will be relief.

Where Hannah is, Nancy closes her eyes and thinks, there is cool shade and lemonade, and the rooms will be closed and stuffy, and in the study her—

She shivers and rubs her gloved fingertips together so that the earth falls off in small powdery drifts. She counted the days for three months and then she had been sure that there was no baby, that no part of him had survived within her, and she had not known until that day how much she had wanted it to somehow be true.

_It will be over soon._

She thinks of fire, of driving until she reaches the shore and swimming out until her limbs betray her and let her go, of all the ways she has buried herself alive.

\--

He prays her through cracked lips.

When he gave up in a motel room a thousand miles away, he started following the blood. The emergency room nurses remembered her, in the smaller towns, in the outskirts and the in-betweens; they were always near but never in the cities where she had taken cases. She would have scars on her arms, she would have burns on the soles of her feet, he learned, and he began to feel them himself. During an ambulance ride from a shelter she had told the technician working on her that she was sorry, and that was all she had said; there had been no false name, none of the lies that had marked all the other leads he'd found. She was sorry.

He is two hundred miles outside El Paso when his office calls to tell him that she has called, and said nothing, and there have been days when Carson has not spoken at all, days when all he can do is pray for something he may be months too late to prevent.

But she's alive.

But her contacting him after all this silence means the end.

He is frustrated and angry, and he pulls into a truck stop on the interstate. She's out there somewhere, and she's had a thousand lives, and she is not waiting for him. She doesn't want to be found.

"Where did she call from?" His voice is ragged. It's the slimmest hope.

"A little town on the coast."

\--

In the car she puts the disc in for the last time and closes her eyes.

This is the song that was playing the first time he kissed her.

This is the song that was playing when he told her, with his mouth against her ear, that he wanted her to come with him to his family's cabin on the lake, alone, and she shivered in her prom dress and smiled.

This is the song that she heard throbbing bass through the walls when he took her up to his room at the fraternity for the first time.

This is the song that was playing when they made love, when they made love, the night she knew would be their last.

And she can feel it all, all over her skin, she can feel it when she breathes, and she sobs into her cupped palms. When she does this she will not see him again, and she knows that. There are special red-dark places for people like her. There are special red-dark places for people who kill what they love, and she hates that her heart still beats, that she still breathes, without him.

The beach is deserted, the wind whipping the sand, and she leaves the headlights on as she walks out, toward the water, to the black. The sea roars into the quiet inside her and she's trembling, just a little. She wanted to say goodbye but the police will find the car, will find the shell of a life she left behind, and that is as good as saying goodbye.

She closes her eyes and his name ripples through her, sounding off her ribs, vibrating in her bones. There is a pull inside her but the rest of her life is too long to wait, and how could this be called a life anyway.

The first wave is cold as it laps at her bare feet. The cuffs of her jeans soak through first, as the sand sucks at her steps, as she strides out into the water. The undertow would be quick, would feel like sleep, and she won't wake to the misery of knowing the one person in her life that meant everything to her would never be in it again. It will look like an accident.

_I have always loved you,_ he whispers in her ear, as the tide picks her up and her feet are no longer on the sand. _I always knew you were the only one I could ever be with._

She closes her eyes and rolls onto her back, crying silently, facing the moon overhead. His ring is still on her finger. She can still turn back.

There is nothing to return to.

_I want to spend the rest of my life with you._

She can still remember the way his skin felt when they were splashing each other in the ocean, she can still remember his cheek felt under her palm. Nothing has seemed more real.

He is calling her. She can feel it.

She lets the water close over her head.

\--

When he sees the car standing with its driver's side door hanging open like an unfinished sentence and the headlights still on, he knows he's found her, but it still takes a moment for his head to catch up with his heart. The brakes squeal when he pulls into the next space, and a glance confirms that she is no longer in the car.

The sand turns his run into a nightmare in slow motion. There is no one on the beach, but the moon is pale and full overhead, and he scans the rough crests of the waves, searching for a break in the silhouette, for anything, for a bobbing head or a flailing hand. His heart is in his throat. There is nothing.

_"Nancy!"_

He screams her name until his throat is rough and his voice hoarse, until like an answered prayer he sees something, a shape in the distance, so vague it could be a trick of shadow and rippling light. But it's enough.

He dives into the water and remembers the day she was born. She was tiny, her skin mottled, her blue eyes dark and vague. She was to be their first. Then at three she had been the only, the motherless, the sole person who could keep him tethered to his life once his wife was gone.

They had told him that Catherine died in the water, that she hadn't felt a thing, and he had nodded, like it could ever be true.

Carson hasn't seen his daughter in months, and for half a breath he almost wishes this dead weight in his arms isn't her. Her clothes are heavy and pull them both down, sodden in the water, swept in the currents. She does not move, does not fight, not until his feet hit the sand, and then she's panicked, coughing out great gasping breaths as he pulls her in. He staggers a few feet onto the shore and they collapse to the damp sand together, the sea roaring for her return.

Once he gets his breath back he turns to watch her, and when she opens her eyes and sees the moon overhead, the naked anguish on her face is enough to tighten the fist that closed around his heart the day she left. Her skin is still wet but he knows by the sudden shudder of her chest that she's crying.

"How are you here?"

Her voice is rough and she can't breathe, can't speak without coughing.

"You called," he says. "I've been looking for you."

He sees it pass over her face, in the seconds before her answer, the things she doesn't say. He knows she would have had him leave her to this, in her less coherent moments, but there was no way he ever could.

So she just nods, her mouth tight in that way that means she's trying to keep it in, and it all pours out of him, what he couldn't say at the funeral, what he couldn't say to her because he was too afraid of what it would make her do, and now, there is nothing worse she ever could. "Honey, I'm so sorry," he says, and his voice is hoarse from the water, from remembering another pair of very blue eyes, another woman he thought was lost to him forever. "I know you've felt like there was nothing keeping you here anymore, like it would be better to just end it all than go through another day of this... and the only way I got through it was because I had you, and you..."

"And I love him so much that I wake up every morning thinking his name," she says, her voice shaking. "And I thought it would get better if I didn't have to pretend anymore but I can hear him, I can still hear him, and every day I live is like digging my own heart out."

He pulls her into his arms, her cheek against his chest, the way he used to hold her when she was young and still quivering from a nightmare. "I know."

Defensiveness clouds her face for a moment, but clears just as quickly. He does know.

"Baby, you have to come home."

She shakes her head, turns her face to the sea, and he tightens his grip on her.

"Do you think the strong thing, the brave thing, for you to do right now is walk out into the ocean? To cut yourself until you bleed? Your heart will still be broken no matter what you do."

"I wish," she whispers, and her face crumples again, "oh God, I wish I... if I could take it all back, if he'd never met me, if I'd never known him, he'd be alive right now."

"You don't know that."

"Yeah, I do," she says bitterly, and presses the heels of her hands against her eyelids.

"I'd do anything to save you from this," he says.

"And I'd do anything to have him back," she replies, and smiles, but it is a terrible smile. "I almost did."

\--

He drives as far as he can before stopping for the night, as far as he can go from that beach. Even after hot showers and tea from the elderly coffeepot, she still has to have all the room's blankets on before she can stop shivering.

"How long did it take for you to stop feeling like this," she says.

He smiles, and there is no humor in his smile either. "Part of me never did."

He does not sleep for a long time, and once he does, he has only one dream, of Nancy in pink footie pajamas and balanced on the point of Hannah's hip, a diamond ring in her tiny fist.

And Nancy does not sleep for a long time, and once she does, she dreams of a white dress he never saw her wear, and when she kisses his injured hand Ned smiles and says that he waited for her his entire life, and he'll wait for her for a thousand more years if he has to, no matter what.

No matter what.


End file.
